Copy of high school graduation picture of Wanda Martin shot to death Sept. 6/1994 in Richmond when she was age 20. Her common-law husband Wade Skiffington was arrested in 1999 in Nfld. after an undercover operation. Ian Lindsay / Vancouver Sun

A man who was convicted of murdering his wife in Richmond nearly 25 years ago was in court Monday seeking to be released on bail pending a review of his case ordered by the federal justice minister.

In November 2001, Wade Skiffington was found guilty by a B.C. Supreme Court jury of the September 1994 second-degree murder of Wanda Martin, 20, his common-law wife, after confessing to the crime following an undercover police operation.

The victim had been shot six times in the apartment of a friend in Richmond. The couple’s young son was in the apartment at the time. Skiffington, who is now 52 years old, received a life sentence with no parole eligibility for 13 years.

The Newfoundland man maintained his innocence and appealed his conviction but had the appeal denied and has remained in custody.

Then in 2017, Innocence Canada, a group devoted to exonerating offenders who have been wrongfully convicted, applied to the minister to conduct a review of Skiffington’s case.

Wade Skiffington.PNG

In June last year, a preliminary assessment by a unit of the justice department found that there may be a reasonable basis to conclude that a miscarriage of justice had likely occurred.

An investigation was ordered by the minister but such probes are typically lengthy, taking several years, so Skiffington’s lawyers applied for him to be released on bail pending the outcome of the review.

It’s believed to be the first time in B.C. that such a review by the minister has been ordered in a murder case.

On Monday, Phil Campbell, a lawyer for Skiffington, told B.C. Supreme Court Justice Michael Tammen that the case had to be seen through the lens of a 2014 decision at the Supreme Court of Canada that set new guidelines for the undercover operations known as Mr. Big operations.

He said he hoped that the minister would decide to direct the case to the B.C. Court of Appeal for a further review or to the B.C. Supreme Court for a new trial.

Campbell focussed his submissions on the facts of the case and Skiffington’s confession to the crime during the Mr. Big operation.

He argued that the confession was unreliable and falsely arrived at and asserted that the evidence strongly pointed to his client’s innocence.

The techniques the undercover RCMP officers used involved staged violence, which affected the reliability of the confession, Campbell told the judge.

“They created an atmosphere of criminality and menace,” he said.

The techniques, which cannot be reported due to an ongoing publication ban, would be rejected under the standards set by the recent Supreme Court of Canada ruling, he said.

Campbell offered an “innocence hypothesis” of what actually happened and which he said led to Skiffington being wrongfully convicted.

He said Skiffington and his wife loved each other, although the accused could be jealous and controlling and did not like it when his wife proposed becoming a sex phone operator.

Campbell said that under the innocence hypothesis, Skiffington took his wife and child to the Richmond apartment but did not shoot her as alleged.

When police questioned him later, Skiffington, who was working at his job cleaning carpets on the day of the slaying, did not have gunshot residue on him.

“When police examined him, he did not have a gun because he never had a gun. They found no evidence of the crime on his person or in the van. The actual killer of Wanda, that person has never been identified.”

Campbell said police launched the undercover operation in 1999, five years after the murder, and had not found another suspect in the slaying of the young mother.

To grant bail in such cases, an offender must prove that the application is not frivolous, that the offender will surrender into custody when so ordered and that detention is not necessary in the public interest.

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